Givit Video Editor App Review

This is the 200th article I have written on Technology Bloggers! I really enjoy writing for the blog and value the community. :-)

Technology Bloggers top smartphone app reviewers are without a doubt, Steve and Ron. In the past I have attempted app reviews myself, however I have never reviewed just a single application in one post. What better time to try something new then than in post 200!

I’m playing it safe with my first app review, and choosing an app that has already been reviewed by TechCrunch, and written about on the The Wall Street Journal’s website. The app is called Givit Video Editor, and is available for all iDevices.

What is Givit?

So what exactly is Givit Video Editor? Well in the words of (the apps creators) Vmix Media:

“Givit is a free, fun and simple app to quickly make and share great videos on iPhone.”

As I am sure you know, Instagram is a photo sharing application, which lets you share photos you take, pretty much instantly, to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Givit offers a similar service, but for video.

Sharing

One of the key features of the app is its sociability. The app interoperates ‘one-click’ sharing to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, as well as email compatibility, so you can privately email clips. You can also upload your videos to the Givit cloud, where you get 5GB of free storage.

Share videos iPhone application

A screenshot of the Givit sharing screen.

The latest version of the app (3.2.0) enables you to find and invite your Facebook friends, so you can see which of them are sharing their videos, and post your clips to your stream.

Features

The app is a clever video editor, which lets you mash different clips together, so you can chip and chop the best bits of clips and the stitch them together to make great montages.

The app is also compatible with live editing, so you can modify clips as you are filming, adding effects and music wherever you choose.

Cost

One of the best things about the app is that it is completely free! With the Standard Account (as I mentioned earlier) you get 5GB of permanent free storage; so long as you use it once every 3 months. 5GB is enough room to store around 30 minutes of uncompressed HD video; Givit probably have some clever compression going on, so I would imagine you get a bit more that 30 minutes.

Half an hour is all I think I need, as the clips I want to share are only usually a minute or two long, however if you are a budding videographer and need more space you can buy a Premium Account, which costs $29.99 a year, for an extra 100GB of storage.

So far, reviews of the app seem positive. The apps official iTunes rating is currently 4 stars in the UK store and 3.5 in the US store. Coverage on sites like Macworld, CNET and the above mentioned TechCrunch indicate the growing popularity of the service.

Interested in getting the app? Click here to download the Givit from iTunes.

Shoot, edit, share and store – that’s Givit!

Instagram (AKA Facebook) in the News

Instagram hit the news with a bang today, and for all the wrong reasons.

They changed their privacy policy so that they have permission to sell any photos that users have posted to third parties. This means that maybe one day you might see that photo of your dog driving a toy car on TV advertising the said toy.

Dog Driving

A Dog driving a Toy Car

Great, you get famous. Not so great, you don’t get paid for it.

Yes our friends at Instagram have the right to sell the photo and keep the money. They may also “share your information as well as information from tools like cookies, log files, and device identifiers and location data with organisations that help us provide the service to you… (and) third-party advertising partners.”

They are not doing it for the money of course, but to “help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.”

They just want to make your user experience more fun. “This means we can do things like fight spam more effectively, detect system and reliability problems more quickly, and build better features for everyone by understanding how Instagram is used,” it said in a statement.

If you don’t want to give them the right to do this you have a choice of course. You can withdraw all your pictures and delete your account by 16th January and never use them again.

I have written various articles about Facebook and their fluid privacy policies, you can find one here.

One of the most incredible things to me is reading the comments that these articles have provoked. Some people do not care about privacy, it seems to be a thing that only we oldies ever think about. This is a massive change in culture and opens a myriad of possibilities for exploitation in many forms.

Many of my friends use Facebook, probably all of them, but I am the odd one out. I do not use Facebook. A choice that has consequences, I could not register for Spotify the other week, they want your information. But I don’t want to share mine! And recently I applied for a job as a journalist but they wanted a breakdown of my social networking, so if you don’t do social networking you must not be a very good writer.

So make sure that your Instagram friends know what is happening so they can make an informed decision, think about what you post and where you post it, and remember, nothing comes for free, not even social networking.